Pessoa

FINALIST: 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY

A NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021

A revelation. Such a revolutionary literary discovery seems unlikely to be on offer again. Its that goodSunday Times

A masterpiece of literary biography. Zenith has produced a work in some ways as astonishing as those of Pessoa himself John Gray, New Statesman

For many thousands of readers Fernando Pessoas The Book of Disquiet is almost a way of life. Ironic, haunting and melancholy, this completely unclassifiable work is the masterpiece of one of the twentieth centurys most enigmatic writers.

Richard Zeniths Pessoa at last allows us to understand this extraordinary figure. Some eighty-five years after his premature death in Lisbon, where he left over 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) can now be celebrated as one of the great modern poets. Setting the story of his life against the nationalistic currents of European history, Zenith charts the heights of Pessoas explosive imagination and literary genius.

Much of Pessoas charm and strangeness came from his writing under a variety of names that he used not only to conceal his identity but also to write in wildly varied styles with different imagined personalities. Zenith traces the back stories of virtually all of these invented others, called heteronyms, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself.

Zeniths monumental work confirms the power of Pessoas words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life. It is also a wonderful book about Lisbon, the city which Pessoa reinvented and through which his different selves wandered.

Definitive and sublimeNew York Times

Completely superb and magisterial. Finally, this extraordinary poet gets the great biography he deserves. Unsurpassable William Boyd